I. Project UpdatesLast Monday and Wednesday, our group commuted to Oakland to assist our community partners in their outreach meetings and meet more of the Resilient Oakland Team. At the Monday community meeting given in English, Gideon and Ryan acted as scribes and participants, brainstorming possible ways to engage under-represented groups as well as design fair retrofitting policies.

The community meeting on Monday was attended by 8 community members, all of whom were home owners, and one very vocal man who was a landlord of 60+ units around the city. In speaking with Victoria after the meeting, it became clear that one of the main takeaways was that there might be groups within Oakland that the city has not taken into account yet when designing their retrofit program – most notably, in the meeting, condominium communities. One woman was a member of a condominium, and she was vocal about the difficulties that could be faced when dealing with the prospect of a retrofit needing to be approved by a board.

Unfortunately, the community meeting on Wednesday (Spanish) had no attendance. We started discussing reasons for that to be so, and thinking of possible strategies to reach and engage more people. For instance, by publicizing the program at schools and libraries so as to get to adults through their kids, who also happen to be more engaged in social media (another powerful option for outreach) than the average hispanic parent. On the bright side, during that visit to Oakland we had the opportunity to meet with Tim Low (Oakland’s building inspector), as well as Danielle Hutchings and Dana Brechwald from ABAG’s resilience program, at the City of Oakland.

Over the course of this week we set up an Oakland Resilience email account and begin subscribing to Yahoo Groups representing various community groups in the City of Oakland. Some groups were for neighborhoods within the city and some were for interest groups; they ranged from 20-800+ members. We estimate that the Resilience team will be able to reach out to around 3000 people through these various groups. While no outreach has been done yet, Sue believed this was an important step in developing connections to pre-existing networks of public stakeholders.

In addition to setting up an updated Yahoo Accounts and joining the large number of community groups, we created a Facebook Page for the Oakland Retrofit program, creating one place for all the information that a tenant or landowner might need to retrofit, including links to the Oakland website. Sue Piper sent out the first rendition of the page on Friday, and we will be continuously updated the page with comments from the team.

II. What We Observed and LearnedThe community meeting on Monday was attended by 8 community members, all of whom were home owners, and one very vocal man who was a landlord of 60+ units around the city. In speaking with Victoria after the meeting, it became clear that one of the main takeaways was that there might be groups within Oakland that the city has not taken into account yet when designing their retrofit program – most notably, in the meeting, condominium communities. One woman was a member of a condominium, and she was vocal about the difficulties that could be faced when dealing with the prospect of a retrofit needing to be approved by a board.

Overall, the general attitude was amicable. The homeowners truly seemed there to learn and become more informed about the situation. It did not seem like they were using this meetings as simply a platform to air grievances held against the city (although there was one man who was rather bluntly expressing his dislike of rent-control).

The only time attitudes shifted into anger was when a slide was shown detailing the proposed aims of a city-wide retrofit program. People became irate at the notion that “severe structural damage” was apparently a satisfactory outcome, in the eyes of the city, for some structures in the event of an earthquake. The city’s rationale was that some structures were in such a sorry condition that anything short of complete collapse in the event of an earthquake would be acceptable. Both Ryan and Gideon agreed that that particular slide should have been defined further or removed, as it brought to focus the lack of set retrofit standards and resulted in confusion and anger.

Although our meeting with ABAG and structural engineers Tim, Danielle and Dana on Wednesday was very productive, it also left us with some uncertainty about how our efforts could contribute to the program. Particularly, we learned that ABAG has already worked on some mapping initiatives including census data and seismic shaking, which was part of what we stated as our goal. As Oakland is so close to the Hayward fault, Tim described, the shaking intensity is high and does not vary much throughout the city, thus, making it nearly not useful for prioritization efforts since it would assign virtually the same vulnerability to all locations. Regarding socio-economic data, there was also a limitation due to the fact such information must not be disclosed at the level of households, whereas aggregated measures (such as those from the census) are not specific enough. We hope that some results from the survey being conducted by the City are available soon so that we can gather some information at the level of blocks or buildings.

Finally, we realized that the problems ABAG and the City are most concerned about are beyond the scope of our project, namely: an analysis of the cost and associated risk reduction of retrofit strategies at the city level is clearly the most interesting result we could have, but as much as we’d like to work on it, it certainly exceeds our timeline and training. During the meeting we also gathered some data about soft-story buildings (collected from owners) which includes information about materials, open spaces, number of stories and other layout information. With a preliminary analysis we found that 3-story buildings constitute the median, average and mode of soft-story buildings in Oakland, so we might narrow our analysis to that specific archetype. We also will perform additional analysis on this database to detect any other patterns that might be of interest to our partner and communities.

III. Critical Analysis & Next StepsBased on our community outreach we have identified some key challenges that face the Oakland Retrofit team. In outreach efforts, it is apparent from the low attendance rates that the Oakland team has not yet been successful at engaging the tenants and landowners of the 22,000 soft story homes; this could be for several reasons, described by a few of the participants in the outreach sessions. One such reason is the notion that there is a mismatch between the risk that the tenants perceive and the risk that the city has discerned through studies. Although the city understands the risks, perhaps these risks are not being communicated effectively to the community members. Owners, on the other hand, we found to be relatively more motivated to commit to the financial costs of retrofitting, and saw retrofits as a means to protect their assets. Another general reason for low attendance could be technical and logistical. There were a few broken links on the city website, making the page with the community meeting times and locations inaccessible. Notice of these meetings, such as the one on Wednesday, was given on relatively short notice, a week before the fact. On the technical assessment side, Camilo and Luis discussed with ABAG and the structural engineers our idea of mapping the relative vulnerability in terms of earthquake measures. As Tim, the structural engineer detailed, a map of vulnerability in terms of earthquake shaking would not necessarily be useful to them, because Oakland’s close proximity to the Hayward fault the whole area essentially at risk, and individual differences in regions would not be consequential.

Moving forward, we would like to shift our focus from providing new information and analysis to communicating the specific risks of earthquake damage to community members with GIS maps and diagrams of the structural damage. This is feasible, given that the variability of the soft-story homes is low: most soft-story homes are 3-story and follow a very similar layout. With the assistance of Tim, the structural engineer for the project, we hope to deliver an informational pamphlet that will engage tenants and hopefully motivate retrofitting. To achieve this, we hope to classify the soft-story buildings not by earthquake risk but by categorizing structural type, based on factors such as the ratio of concrete to open space on the ground floor and the number of stories. This pamphlet, as we envision it now, will include a pictorial, schematic model of the most probable damage that will occur to each of the three structural categories, and list out the potential damages as well as potentially list out costs of repair. With GIS, we might also be able to create a map of Oakland that links regions of soft story homes to their most common structural type. With this pamphlet, we envision that a landowner can identify where in Oakland they reside, and use the related picture to identify specifically what a most probable earthquake might do to the structure of their building. We will vet this idea with our community partners through the following weeks and shape the idea with input from the Resilient Oakland team.